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1.09.2013

El Porteno Empanadas

El Porteno Empanadas is a little hard to find in the Ferry Building. Its located along one of the doors that face Market St. They serve up both savory and sweet Argentinian empanadas. I've eaten enough empanadas to know that not every empanadas is alike. Every country and region makes these pastry pockets a little differently. Also, as with all things sold in San Francisco and especially the Ferry Building, the ingredients are organic, farm fresh, and locally sourced.

The carne empanada is stuffed with Prather Ranch organic dry aged grass fed beef, raisins, pimiento stuffed olives, and hard boiled eggs. I was really hoping for a flaky, buttery pastry, but I was pretty disappointed to find a limp, tasteless outer shell. The beef is so stuffed in the empanada it practically explodes out from the first bite. Too bad its bland and if I didn't read the ingredients I would have never known there was pimiento stuffed olives in there. Also, I wasn't a huge fan of the raisins.

More raisins! Raisins, chicken, chicken chorizo, and olives were stuffed inside the pollo empanada. Its a tie between which was worse: this one or the carne.

Same tasteless crust as the rest of the empanadas, but the mushroom stuffing was probably the best of three. The locally picked organic mushrooms gave a nice, earthy flavor with a slight crunch. Other ingredients include shallots, parmesan cheese, and creme fraiche, but all I could really taste was the mushroom, which wasn't a bad thing.

I had some pretty tasty alfajores at Lolinda (see post HERE) so I was excited to see them sold at El Porteno. Besides the traditional dulce de leche, they offer lemon and a housemade quince paste. I decided to stick with the classic dulce de leche, but was pretty unimpressed with the too crumbly and too sweet cookie.